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Wargames is #1 in my book. Sneakers was great though. I think I was too old to like Hackers, it seemed very forced to me.

fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
Come to think of it Wargames is my #2, and I like the Weird Science hacking scene more than hackers
- staticautomatic 7y ago
  +1 for Weird Science.
caymanjim 7y ago
I think Sneakers is more realistic and captures the essence better, but WarGames is the one that impacted me the most and holds a special place in my heart. I was about ten years old when WarGames came out, and I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas that year. About a year later, I got a modem, and about a year after that I started "wardialing" my entire local calling area (and also accidentally some non-local calling areas; I spent the whole summer mowing laws to pay my parents for the giant phone bill that resulted). War dialing led to random "login" prompts, which led to me teaching myself Unix, VMS, and PrimeOS. It led to Tymnet and Telenet (X.25 packet switching networks). That eventually got me, through many complicated jumps, to MIT's free Unix systems (anyone who could access it could get an account). Between MIT's free Unix systems, and a lot of commercial systems that I--ahem--borrowed access to, by the time I was 15 years old, I was already a Unix, C, and Internet expert, years before Linux and even years before any local ISPs existed. When my friend's dad, who worked at AT&T's Bell Labs, found out that I was hacking into systems just to teach myself Unix, he gave me surplus AT&T 3b1 and 3b2 Unix machines. By the time I got to college in 1990, I already knew more about Unix than any of the professors. While that led to me abandoning my courses, it also led to a full-time sysadmin job at the college, and when the Internet exploded a few years later, I was already a decade ahead of my peers, and my career took off from there. So I have WarGames to thank for all of it. I'm sure glad I never got caught hacking into anything; even though I was at worst a grey hat, I had friends who were criminally prosecuted. I was in the same systems that Kevin Mitnick went to jail for five years for accessing.
- supergeek133 7y ago
  That's a great story, thanks for taking the time!

fuzz4lyfe 7y ago

Come to think of it Wargames is my #2, and I like the Weird Science hacking scene more than hackers

staticautomatic 7y ago
+1 for Weird Science.

caymanjim 7y ago

I think Sneakers is more realistic and captures the essence better, but WarGames is the one that impacted me the most and holds a special place in my heart. I was about ten years old when WarGames came out, and I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas that year. About a year later, I got a modem, and about a year after that I started "wardialing" my entire local calling area (and also accidentally some non-local calling areas; I spent the whole summer mowing laws to pay my parents for the giant phone bill that resulted). War dialing led to random "login" prompts, which led to me teaching myself Unix, VMS, and PrimeOS. It led to Tymnet and Telenet (X.25 packet switching networks). That eventually got me, through many complicated jumps, to MIT's free Unix systems (anyone who could access it could get an account). Between MIT's free Unix systems, and a lot of commercial systems that I--ahem--borrowed access to, by the time I was 15 years old, I was already a Unix, C, and Internet expert, years before Linux and even years before any local ISPs existed. When my friend's dad, who worked at AT&T's Bell Labs, found out that I was hacking into systems just to teach myself Unix, he gave me surplus AT&T 3b1 and 3b2 Unix machines. By the time I got to college in 1990, I already knew more about Unix than any of the professors. While that led to me abandoning my courses, it also led to a full-time sysadmin job at the college, and when the Internet exploded a few years later, I was already a decade ahead of my peers, and my career took off from there. So I have WarGames to thank for all of it. I'm sure glad I never got caught hacking into anything; even though I was at worst a grey hat, I had friends who were criminally prosecuted. I was in the same systems that Kevin Mitnick went to jail for five years for accessing.

supergeek133 7y ago
That's a great story, thanks for taking the time!